Just wanted to say that I've very much enjoyed reading your contributions to this thread.
No. I don't think that if women had the right to tell the story they would tell it in a way that limited femininity to being the 'soil' in which a male plants a 'seed'
OR it will be masculine because of these effects of gendered typical differences AND because describing society not as a fight to dominate chaos - but as an opportunity for individuals to grow a new way that works for people - is not something supportive of the violence needed to dominate the earth and become the "USA #1 #1 founding myth."
Masculine ideas spread because they entail murder and hate instead of acceptance and love.
Take, for example, the social ordering logic of nursing. Nursing is about the whole person and helping bring them to full health. This is as opposed to typical doctoring, which is about finding and eliminating disease.
Why do we run our society like doctors instead of nurses? I say it is because we take for granted the same masculine system that JP does; a system which he may not be aware of, or may think is essential to society, but for which clear alternatives exist.
The great mother who gives birth to the earth and nurtures man kind; as opposed to the great father who dominates the extant-earth and creates a world to live in.
It is very hard to imagine such a world view, because we start with the emotional sense "but then who dominates so we are forced to get along?!" But from a Matriarchal system of myth, we would ask just as intuitively of this system "but then who nurtures so we can all get along?!"
I'm working on this; but I think founding myths are built into how we make meaning out of our sensations. Our social ordering logics (like professions) are built into how we form our intentions and notice our sensations. Our personal narratives (like i'm bob the builder) are how we make sense out of our sensations.
You seem to have found the key to digging past personal narratives into the social odering logic of "the faily" where love is used to justify torture for being a "bad boy" thus perverting the foundational mythic emotion of love into the masculine world of domination.
Yes; and masculine dualism is needed to dominate. I can't be better than you if I am you.
I think we have an opportunity to stop thinking in terms of domination and grow as a species; no longer does one myth need to kill another to win the minds of the world - we have a chance to see past, awaken to how badly our founding myth of masculinity, our social ordering logic of the family, and our personal narratives are inbeded in a system of shame and neigh unconfrontable psychic pain: it and imagine all the people living in harmony.
Alright. If working hard and not talking about where I put my dick is privilege, then I'm privileged. Who am I to argue? I could wish that my privilege didn't require so much effort, and paid better.
The gender and sexual difference of the individual are distinct from the masculine/feminine embedded within the social ordering logic. The particular acts that a person uses to seek self-(hate)-escape, while often gender prescribed, are also distinct from the professional role one plays.
JP claims there is good and bad in masculinity and femininity; but he focuses on the use of the 'good' in masculinity to overcome the 'bad' in femininity: Which is much like someone with heart disease, speaking to a society eating cheese burgers on the regular, saying saying "we need to be careful about beans, they can make you fart, don't eat too much fiber!"
First, thank you for providing feedback on my thinking. I hope what I write below doesn't seem like I am overlooking the points you are making; if they do let me know, i'll try to address them.This does not appear to be true. It looks like you just tried to say that sex is biological, and gender is socially constructed. Gender, while in big part is influenced by society, is not solely socially constructed. In the psychological this is a well accepted principle.The gender and sexual difference of the individual are distinct from the masculine/feminine embedded within the social ordering logic. The particular acts that a person uses to seek self-(hate)-escape, while often gender prescribed, are also distinct from the professional role one plays.
For example, when you introduce hormone levels into someone that elevates them and brings them closer to the baseline of the average male, you see their personality traits shift. Those personality traits also shift toward the average male.
So, because biology drives these hormones, and those hormones appear to in part drive personality, it would appear highly unlikely that gender is only socially constructed.
Notice how you've used the passive voice to overlook the fact that YOU are the one making this argument? Is JP appealing to authority when he gives you these words? He is, I assure you, relying on his the authority of a professor of psychology from a middle-ranked university.Male and Female are conceptualized as being a spectrum. Both have traits that when done in excess produce outcomes that are generally accepted to be bad. Because they are on a spectrum, moving away from an extreme of one, brings you closer to another.
Says who? According to JP: The typial founding mythos of western societies as they evolve into monotheistic systems of patriarchy. But without a specific "who" here it's just "god says."Femininity is chaos, Masculinity is order.
See how you jumped from the individual sexual relation to gendered norms to a much higher level of analysis, namely social foundational myths? You've skipped the social, and you've made no mention of the fact that societies filled with people of both sexes, are part of the 'gendered' sway between masculine and feminine founding myths.You cannot have innovation if you have too much order, and so the remedy to a society that is not innovative enough to solve its problems will need to move closer to the Feminine to achieve creativity.
A society that is creative, but, does not have a system of competence hierarchy will not be able to utilize that creativity. It will need to establish some order to be able to utilize its innovation.
The problem with your analogy is that you are trying to take a huge benefit and making the much smaller cost seem as if they are equal. Societies do need balance. That does not mean that heart disease is the equal opposite of flatulence simply because one is a cost and the other is a benefit.
First, thank you for providing feedback on my thinking. I hope what I write below doesn't seem like I am overlooking the points you are making; if they do let me know, i'll try to address them.
Let me see if I can be more specific here:
1) Gender (short for the socially prescribed gender roles in a society with which an individual affiliates) and sex (the genetic basis upon which biological procreation is possible) are distinct
2) Gender and sex are not un-related
3) Gender is strongly influenced by sex
4) Gender is not always determined by sex
Therefore
5) It is therefore important to distinguish between an individual's sex and an individual's gender.
That said, there was a north American native tribe where planting was done by men because men collected the food; another where planting was done by women because women gathered from the fields. Both were open to allowing people to identify with either gendered role.
Thus a man with more testosterone in the first society would be more likely to plant fields; a man with more testosterone in the second would be less likely to plant fields. Biology directs people toward or away from socially prescribed gender roles; but it rarely determines what those gender roles must be. On the other hand, there are typicality aspects of gender roles that are fairly consistent between cultures: for example, it is typical of men to dominate and subjugate women. That something is natural or common does not make it good or right.
That said, I was NOT talking about the individual level: I was talking about how foundational myths in a society work through the ordering logics of a society to then be embraced by people differently. Thus the example of the masculine nurse, who still nurses using a feminine logic.
Notice how you've used the passive voice to overlook the fact that YOU are the one making this argument? Is JP appealing to authority when he gives you these words? He is, I assure you, relying on his the authority of a professor of psychology from a middle-ranked university.
Don't use the passive voice, it hides who is doing the arguing, and takes for granted that the argument is a truth from God.
I don't mean to badger you on a simple turn of phrase, but this passive voice is essential to understanding the problem with your next quote:
Says who? According to JP: The typial founding mythos of western societies as they evolve into monotheistic systems of patriarchy. But without a specific "who" here it's just "god says."
I will bet you anything that a matriarchial system does NOT equate femininity with chaos; but rather equates chaos with masuclinity. Hell, I bet many women don't take for tranted that women are the unknowable sea to be plundered and explored.
See how you jumped from the individual sexual relation to gendered norms to a much higher level of analysis, namely social foundational myths? You've skipped the social, and you've made no mention of the fact that societies filled with people of both sexes, are part of the 'gendered' sway between masculine and feminine founding myths.
JP turns what is obvious and trivial anthropology into psychology; wrongly assumes that the individual in her or his sex is somehow a representative of the founding myth - women are all somehow embodiment of chaos and men embodiment of order - when that's about as rational a position to take as women women are all short and men are all tall.
Yes, at the edges the differences in the center lead to large differences in numbers of outliers; but even between cultures the average Asian man is significantly shorter than the average Nordic woman.
Yet JP would have us believe that something that varies significantly more than height between cultures - Hofstede's factor of "uncertainty avoidance" - is 1) the such an important aspect of society that one needs a whole book to cure it, 2) not worth mentioning that there are many other aspects of culture, and may other moral foundations 3) creating the impression in followers minds (see your statements) that since gender is highly related to sex, and gender is related to chaos/order in myth, sex determines connection with chaos/order.
Peterson’s subtitle is “An Antidote to Chaos”, and the point of his rules is to help people to achieve order. “Order is where the people around you act according to well-understood social norms, and remain predictable and cooperative.” It is “explored territory.” “Chaos, by contrast, is where—or when—something unexpected happens.” It is “all those things and situations we neither know nor understand.” Without justification, he says that order is symbolically masculine while chaos is feminine. Both chaos and order are part of Being in his subjective sense, so they belong to experience of reality rather than to reality itself.
That's fair. It's more like choosing between too much and too little exercise. Marathon runners give themselves mild heart attacks and die a little earlier because they run so much.
So JP is arguing "you guys, I know you don't exercise enough; but look at those health nuts, some of them are exercising TOO MUCH - watch out!"
I mentioned two points I would like to reiterate. The first is that when it comes to balancing order and creativity, the imbalance one tends to want to address is the one a person finds him or herself contextualized in. I see Peterson at the bleeding edge of being knifed by radical feminism. He sees government intervention into his freedom of academic expression. I see society as a whole more generally under threat from the authoritarian right. Peterson seems to want to ask, when has the left gone too far. I see, also, a disinclination to answer.
The second point is that I believe the issue of the naming of masculine and feminine to the differentiated and the undifferentiated may be organically connected to the differences in lateral brain specialization among males and females generally, the left hemisphere adapt an thinking naming and language, would that be logos, and the right brain specializing in non-verbal pattern recognition and intuition. This, then, would have nothing to do with whether masculine is planting or gathering as both would be left brain produced concepts. This would imply to me, then, that the mythologizing of the masculine and the feminine as abstract notions having to due with the nature of linguistically produced thought and thus duality would be as old as language itself.
@realibrad An issue I would take with your description here is the expression of the linear nature that you use in describing the right, the center or middle and the left. I see that linear relationship also but the escape from it as the line at the base of a triangle formed by a point above the middle that represents a resolution at a deeper state of consciousness. I see a triangle.
It is there that the masculine and the feminine become a conscious awareness of the faces of a heads tail coin, but of the coin itself.
To awaken is to resolve paradox via the collapse of duality which includes the ending of suffering with the ending of the unconscious associations we have between self identifications and good and evil.
Suffering is thinking because thought is the past, the associations we have learned between concepts and feelings, and do not consciously remember because their very forging was suffering itself.
To resolve this existential problem there will arise in the mind of those trapped in dualism the twin but opposite notions of acceptance and resistance, the path of the Master and the Saint or coin faces of the integration where the individual becomes both the Will of God, the creator, and the perfect mirror of it, the created.
A difficulty the knower or experiencer will always have in the communication of this is that states of awareness can’t be made to recreate themselves in others by the use of words. All one can do is suggest there is an experience that causes an outpouring of love at the cessation of suffering that produces a state that creates the feeling that only love exists. I believe it is this that is the soull desires and that when found, in turn creates the desire to share.
I love your posts . I may not agree with em or sometimes even comprehend whatever you are trying to convey but I do enjoy them
MY take :
I really don't know what the big deal is here. I finally got around to watching a few interviews with what seemed to be very intelligent ( albeit hostile) people and Peterson holds his own. He's very measured. A lot of what he says isn't really controversial. Look around you.
There are differences between men and women. Women are more nurturing. Men create, destroy to create, map, plan yadda yadda. Western society is based on Judaeo Christian values. Raise your children in a manner that you can stand to be around them when they become adults. As for the lobster thing I dunno.
Can anyone say exactly, short and sweet, why people find this man so offensive?
your understanding of men and women is largely nothing but your social conditioning, thats one of the big issues. Jordan uses the current state as a justification for why thing are they way they are while completely ignoring the environment that lead to that state, its either stupidity or dishonesty on his part.
He defends harmful behaviors and ideas, ideas harmful to the poor, women, and minorities, behaviors I spend my days researching the negative consequences of.I love your posts . I may not agree with em or sometimes even comprehend whatever you are trying to convey but I do enjoy them
MY take :
I really don't know what the big deal is here. I finally got around to watching a few interviews with what seemed to be very intelligent ( albeit hostile) people and Peterson holds his own. He's very measured. A lot of what he says isn't really controversial. Look around you.
There are differences between men and women. Women are more nurturing. Men create, destroy to create, map, plan yadda yadda. Western society is based on Judaeo Christian values. Raise your children in a manner that you can stand to be around them when they become adults. As for the lobster thing I dunno.
Can anyone say exactly, short and sweet, why people find this man so offensive?
Moon: sorry I’m behind on this, crazy high time demands.
He defends harmful behaviors and ideas, ideas harmful to the poor, women, and minorities, behaviors I spend my days researching the negative consequences of.
He does a good job, rarely is he technically wrong; but what people take away from him is very wrong.
your understanding of men and women is largely nothing but your social conditioning, thats one of the big issues. Jordan uses the current state as a justification for why thing are they way they are while completely ignoring the environment that lead to that state, its either stupidity or dishonesty on his part.
He brings the listener to the conclusion that seeking social and economic justice risks a Stalinism.What harmful ideas does he have about minorities?
He brings the listener to the conclusion that seeking social and economic justice risks a Stalinism.
I argue that It’s NOT seeking justice that leads to such atrocities.
As Allan Greenspan argues in “age of turbulence” - Democracy creates a pressure release valve for capitalism when, inevitably, wealth becomes too concentrated.
Because harm for authority’s sake is the ethos he’s defending; helping and fairness the “absolute power” he warns against.I believe you have completely misunderstood that. I just went through that, and it seems clear that the warning is that if you give any group complete power to shape society, that people with motives of power will corrupt that system and take it over. The point of the Gulag Archipelago was just that, which is why his video was wrapped in that theme.
So, to attribute a warning that ultimate power ultimately corrupts as an argument defending harmful actions to the poor, women, and minorities is incredibly. But, instead of linking me to a 45+ min video, can you put into your own words why you perceived his words to be a defense of harming the poor, women, and minorities?
Because harm for authority’s sake is the ethos he’s defending; helping and fairness the “absolute power” he warns against.
Ignoring that we see homeless people in the street, suffering from the “absolute power” of the authority of capital markets.
Where he argues for “order” it is clear his brand of order works against overcoming the chaos the present ordering-system creates, particularly when it is seen in the worlds of those that are invisible to white middle class men.